The world is far too complex, and variation between societal types is too vast, for a categorisation dividing it into two mutually exclusive kinds of… - Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Anthropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and humanity through detailed studies of local life, made sense of through comparison and contextualisation. But it is also a form of storytelling about the lives that you and I could have led, but didn’t because we were busy living our own lives.

The art of cultural translation consists in oscillating between distance and nearness, between one’s own concepts and the native ones, or – to put it differently – making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic.

In spite of the lack of clarity in the concept of society, the word is doubtless necessary. In everyday language, words denoting local communities, large-scale society and global society exist, and all refer to actually existing entities, existing at different systemic levels. Humans are integrated in (that is, they participate in and contribute to) several social systems, some operating at a large scale, others at a small scale. When anthropologists delineate their field of study, the level of scale is determined by the issues at hand.